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colorado review 154 just like trees and oil, water and air,” he predicts, a prophecy that would make any book lover shiver. Still, you have to hand it to a first-time novelist for giving the devil the first and last word. I hope that the carnival buys another elephant and goes back to Nazareth. And I can’t wait for the sequel. Lives and Letters, by Robert Gottlieb Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011 reviewed by Jaya Aninda Chatterjee Robert Gottlieb, man of letters, enjoyed a storied tenure as a media and publishing baron at such bastions of literature and criticism as the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Simon & Schuster, and Alfred A. Knopf that enriched a keen intellectual acuity and deep sensitivity to the arts writ large. Both sensibilities, learned and learning, infuse Lives and Letters , braiding together the lives of actors, singers, authors, dancers , and directors revered in their historical moment but largely overlooked today. Prefiguring accusations of solipsism that a critical reader may map onto his compendium, Gottlieb opens with an apology for his self-indulgent style and apparent lack of organizing principle. Yet such a capacious intellect obviates the need for an apology from this late-career polymath. Nor is the collection quite as random as its author signals. A touch of audacity in the preface, as well as in the ensuing essays, would be both apposite and merited. Lapidary character sketches follow. Gottlieb questions our captive interest in Sarah Bernhardt, whose floruit dates place her “well past her glory days and well out of our reach.” In an informative essay rife with charming anecdotes, he posits that her own fictive self-presentation (“she was . . . constitutionally untruthful: constantly self-dramatizing, embroidering, storytelling ”) and the agonistic influence she had on novelists such as Henry James (whose Tragic Muse she inspired), Twain, Freud, and D. H. Lawrence, coupled with her raw talent, indefatigable energy, and risk-taking (she broke her contract with the established Comédie Française and the Odéon to found her own production company and embark on a tour of America) enshrined her in artistic memory. 155 Book Notes Confluence and continuities abound between the Bernhardt essay and “Long Distance Runner” and “Bringing Up Biographer ,” on Lillian Gish and Katharine Hepburn, respectively. Gottlieb asks why, of the silent film stars who faded into oblivion , Gish alone built a sixty-year career, considering that both Bernhardt and Gish were artfully enigmatic about and fiercely independent in their personal lives, yet unabashedly melodramatic as actresses. Interviewing Gish, he observes “something steely . . . in her guardedness: she had decided on her version of the past, and no other version was discussable.” She tells a lifelong friend, “It isn’t easy being a Lillian Gish.” Hepburn, similarly, was “strident, evasive, patchy, [and] willful” in her autobiography, brazen in her actions, and completely in command of certain key friendships, notably with her biographer A. Scott Berg. Permanence in the theatrical and cinematic worlds, Gottlieb’s essay intimates, necessitates an orchestrated and prolonged act of self-creation. Yet Gottlieb’s incisive reading of this act breaks, for viewers and readers, the frames these actresses so carefully constructed for themselves. The essays of greatest resonance explore the architectonics of emotional and editorial judiciousness and equilibrium. “Francine du Plessix Gray: Him + Her = Them” probes the conflicted yet balanced memoir of the novelist’s upbringing by a narcissistic Russian milliner and a magazine editor of protean loyalties. “Who Was Charles Dickens?” traces the valences of Dickens’s biographers’ treatment of his behavior toward women, from John Forster, a close friend, to Michael Slater, a literary scholar. A panoptic treatment of even the canonical biographies is no mean undertaking, and Gottlieb’s careful assessment of their respective opinions drew my appreciation on the first serial appearance of this article in the New York Review of Books. In “Max and Marjorie: An Editorial Love Story,” too, Gottlieb is in finest form, mapping the epistolary friendship between lionized Scribner editor Maxwell Perkins and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of The Yearling. Revering Perkins for knowing that “editing lies in another, larger kind of sympathy—the sympathy that can intuit the kind of book a given...

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